I have heard that the City of Stuttgart has banned diesel engined cars.
From what I can gather, particulates are the problem.

That situation will help further drive the development of turbocharged petrol cars, as well as hybrids and electric vehicles.
Such vehicles won't make any difference to CO2 emissions. You will need wind and solar for that. Electric vehicles run equally well on electricity generated from coal fired power stations.
The advent of electric cars will further drive up electric energy costs from wind and solar.

Idea! Why not rig a sail on your car, and attach solar cells to the roof?
Err....not good. How about tunnels and bridges?

I really don't think that owning a 6.9 or a hybrid or an electric makes all that much difference.
Overall energy consumption has a lot to do with vehicle weight, irrespective of the original energy source.

The single most popular vehicle class is large SUV's, and their near equivalent light trucks. Weight wise, 6.9's are their near equivalent.
That to me, means that society for the most part, doesn't really want to be bothered with climate change, whatever may be the reason for it.

It is alleged that one of the problems with the Boeing 737 Max is that the software was not up to speed. That is, it was outsourced to Indian companies at 1/10th of the cost of developing it in-house with the result being that issues were not fully resolved.
I would not be surprised if this proved to be a factor in diesel gate.
Regards,
Brian

The problem of the 737 Max was caused by the engines.
Er, not the engines exactly.
To make them more efficient they have a larger front intake fan. That is where most of the extra thrust comes from, for no extra fuel burn rate.

The larger diameter of engine introduces two problems.
1. The engines have to be mounted closer to the wings to maintain ground clearance.
2. The engines are of larger diameter.
These two factors, taken together, add extra drag, that at low air speed and high angles of attack, tend to make the nose of the aircraft point down.

Software was introduced to restore the handling characteristics of the aircraft to resemble those of the older aircraft, for which the pilots had been previously trained.
Nose down flight problems presented themselves, during and after takeoff, and although these nose down problems could be easily overcomed by the pilot, only about half of them had been trained in how to deal safely with this problem. The software simply ignored the pilot corrective commands, which were only appropriate to the earlier 737 800's and 900's.

That is why Boeing has had to 'carry the can'.
New revised 'fly by wire' software may not completely solve the problem.

The real 'fix' is to increase the length of the landing gear struts, which implies a re design and re build of the wings to accommodate those struts.
The problem is so big that it could put Boeing out of business, unless the U.S taxpayer bails them out.

Another reason why the U.S. taxpayer may have to bail Boeing out, is that Boeing is the U.S. Government's largest defense hardware contractor.

That is why this problem has taken so long to fix, with no end in sight.

What an excellent and enlightening contribution. I don't know if all information presented by David is right, nor do I know where it comes from. It would appear that he has done some homework on this subject matter, and I certainly appreciate the obvious quality of his post. Let's see how Boeing solve this quite costly and also damaging issue. Thanks David. Great work. Regards. Styria

We talk about autonomous cars, but that is still a bit far away yet, but reading the above, surely aircraft would be the number one contender to be autonomous?

ALL aircraft already talk to each other, cars do not.
This is a basic fundamental of autonomous vehicles, is that each one needs to know what others around them are doing.

ALL aircraft have a full suite of telemetry that the owner, and the manufacturer can view at any time, cars and trucks are just starting to do this.

ALL aircraft self report through telemetry any and all faults. Which means, an aircraft engineer knows what is wrong and what he needs before the aircraft lands.
Cars & trucks are just starting to do this.

With what David is describing, what does the pilot actually have to do, based on the super high tech and software involved.

It seems, the issues described, could be easily overcome by removing the pilot from the equation?

Doesn't matter if it is autonomous cars or aircraft,
there will always be a need for driver or pilot input to provide indirect directive instructions to the autonomous systems in highly unusual situations.
The interface between the two necessarily needs to be fuzzy, and huge amounts of software need to be written. It HAS to be right when millions of copies of cars are required, or life dependent aircraft control systems are involved.

By all means, keep your old classic cars. They will be the only cars left that retain any real character, and are still fun to drive.

Hugely complex interface software is one of the reasons why aircraft like the F-22 cost more than $100 million per copy, and the B-2 bomber cost more than $1 billion per copy, and why Russia cannot afford to get a stealth aircraft into production. Combat interface software is another order above in complexity.